The Manchester Evening News ran a story claiming the comedian Ricky Gervais has suffered "a huge backlash" over a joke. The only problem was that there wasn't that much backlash. Also, it's a hilarious joke.

In fact, most of the responses to the tweet were laudatory, laughing emojis and gifs. The "backlash" was based in the journalistic bad habit of journalists finding a few Twitter accounts here and there that post distaste for something and then claiming that those couple of dissatisfied remarks quantifies a thorough backlash. It doesn't.

A joke like Gervais' isn't controversial — it's actually speaking truth to power. Gervais was vocal throughout the media coverage of Yaniv's case over the summer. One wonders how a comic like Gervais would have been able to keep even the illusion of a straight face over a story about a woman who demanded that other people wax her balls.

It was with the full backing of legislation that Yaniv was able to harass women small business owners and bring the absurd charges. Yaniv received all of the protections under the law, complete with privacy of her name, until she revealed it herself all over social media, and the media ban on Yaniv's identity was lifted.

Yaniv, as everyone is thankfully now aware, is emblematic of the abuse of the system that is now possible if you are from a protected class. This is why the definition of protected classes cannot include those who claim to be oppressed based on a conflation of identities that are void of any basis in biological reality.

The fact that Manchester Evening News journalist Helen Carter refers to both Yaniv (the jerk who tried to force immigrant women to touch his hairy dick and balls and then punished them when they refused by running them out of business) and Gervais (the man who simply made fun of the jerk) as equally "divisive" tells you all you need to know about her agenda.

Carter mischaracterizes Yaniv's complaint, as well, writing that "while the tweet could have been regarded as offensive at face value, it was in relation to Jessica's fight after trying — and failing to find a beauty salon in Canada willing to wax her male intimate area." This is not quite the story. Yaniv sought out small business owners instead of taking her hairy balls to any of the Vancouver salons that specialize in male waxing.

Yaniv lost her case to force estheticians to wax her balls, but as Carter notes, has vowed to continue her fight for transgender rights. Perhaps the next step can be prohibiting any jokes about the absurdity of her original undertaking, or the myriad women she's had banned from social media platforms for speaking honestly about her gender conundrum, or making sure that more leftists are blinded by their own compassion into ignoring the very serious problems this kind of inquest entails.

It would be unkind to tell a comedian that he can't make a joke about a lady who wants to wax her balls. At some point, we have to admit that shutting off our critical faculties just so that we can force ourselves to believe that which we know is untrue, namely that ladies don't have scrotums, is not reasonable. Gervais refused to lie to himself, and we should all do so as well.

In The Spectator, the great Twitter troll Jarvis DuPont takes all those who would bemoan Gervais' joke to task "Despite how many times [Gervais] is educated by people with their pronouns listed in their Twitter, this only appears to make him more impervious to criticism." He's being sarcastic, for all those wokesters who couldn't tell.

What we assume Carter meant to say was that there was "a huge backlash" in her gated community of elite establishment media friends who fritter away their days patting themselves on the back for the empty virtue-signalling and shrill woke-scolding they perform in 800-word think pieces day in and day out. Gervais is not the problem. Even Yaniv is not the problem. The problem is the preponderance of people wagging their fingers and telling us what is and isn't funny.

We're thankful for Gervais. Not only is he one of the brave comedians who will actually stand up to political correctness and the excesses of identity politics, but he consistently reminds us of how we will eventually win this wretched culture war. The key is to never stop laughing.

Comment: The woke crowd continues to try to gaslight the rest of us in telling us something that is clearly funny is not in fact funny. Laugh while you can, folks. It may be outlawed soon.